Norman Jay Levitt (August 27, 1943
– October 24, 2009)
was an American
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
at
Rutgers University
Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was ...
.
Education
Levitt was born in
The Bronx
The Bronx () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the state of New York. It is south of Westchester County; north and east of the New York City borough of Manhattan, across the Harlem River; and north of the New ...
and received a bachelor's degree from
Harvard College
Harvard College is the undergraduate college of Harvard University, an Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636, Harvard College is the original school of Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher ...
in 1963.
He received a PhD from
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...
in 1967.
Work
Levitt was best known for his tireless criticism of "the academic Left"—the
social constructivists,
deconstruction
The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who defined it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essen ...
ists, and
postmodernists—for their anti-science stance which "lump
science in with other cultural traditions as 'just another way of knowing' that is no better than any other tradition, and thereby reduce the scientific enterprise to little more than culturally-determined guess work at best and hegemonic power mongering at worst".
His books (see Bibliography below) and review articles, such as "Why Professors Believe Weird Things: Sex, Race, and the Trials of the New Left" (Levitt emphasized that his own view was left-wing, but such ideas dismayed him),
expose the "academic silliness" and analyze the symptoms and roots of the academic Left's belief that "solemn incantation can overturn the order of the social universe, if only the jargon be appropriately obscure and exotic, and intoned with sufficient fervor". His book ''
Higher Superstition
''Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science'' is a 1994 book about the philosophy of science by the biologist Paul R. Gross and the mathematician Norman Levitt.
Summary
Levitt states he is a leftist trying to save th ...
'' is cited as having inspired the
Sokal affair
The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to '' Social Text'', an aca ...
.
Bibliography
* 1989 ''
Grassmannian
In mathematics, the Grassmannian is a space that parameterizes all -dimensional linear subspaces of the -dimensional vector space . For example, the Grassmannian is the space of lines through the origin in , so it is the same as the projective ...
s and the
Gauss Maps in Piecewise-Linear
Topology
In mathematics, topology (from the Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, without closing ...
''
* 1994 ''
Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science'' (with
Paul R. Gross
Paul R. Gross is a biologist and author, perhaps best known to the general public for '' Higher Superstition'' (1994), written with Norman Levitt. Gross is the University Professor of Life Sciences (Emeritus) at the University of Virginia; he previ ...
)
* 1997 ''The Flight from Science and Reason''
* 1999 ''Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture''
References
Further reading
*
External links
Bibliography of Norman Levitt
{{DEFAULTSORT:Levitt, Norman Jay
1943 births
2009 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
20th-century American Jews
Critics of postmodernism
Harvard College alumni
Princeton University alumni
Rutgers University faculty
The Bronx High School of Science alumni
People from the Bronx
21st-century American mathematicians
Academics from New York (state)
21st-century American Jews